Poland's official National Institute of Remembrance, created to investigate
historic crimes of the Nazi and communist eras, is currently investigating
allegations that Jewish partisans participated in a massacre of civilians
in Poland in early 1944. The institute launched the investigation in February
2001 at the request of the Canadian Polish Congress.

Robert Janicki, deputy commissioner for prosecution of crimes against
the Polish nation, told the Forward in a written statement that the institute
was interviewing witnesses, including both victims and perpetrators, and
was gathering archival material from several countries, but that no date
had been set for the conclusion of the investigation.

Still, the institute has issued some preliminary reports, which contain
allegations that some 50 to 60 Jewish partisans were part of a 120-strong
Soviet partisan unit that attacked the village of Koniuchy on January 29,
1944. At least 35 civilians were killed, and the village, now located in
Lithuania and called Kaniuakai, was burned to the ground, according to
the reports. The investigation, which has not been reported in the United
States and was unknown to a series of scholars interviewed for this article,
is creating unease among Jews because of its possible political motives.

"It is very convenient for the Canadian Polish Congress to raise this
issue instead of providing explanations about pogroms of Poles against
Jews during and after the war," said Hebrew University historian Dov Levin,
who was a member of one of the Jewish partisan units operating under Soviet
command in that region and has written several books on the issue.

Calls to the Canadian Polish Congress seeking comment were not returned.
Although relations between Poland and Israel have improved over the past
decade, the affair is likely to fuel further acrimony in Polish-Jewish
relations, which have been soured in recent years by disputes over the
1941 massacre of Jews by Poles in the village of Jedwabne, which some Poles
blamed on German soldiers. The tensions spilled over into this country
when a Polish-American leader made antisemitic remarks on the issue last
year. While some observers expressed concerns about the intentions of the
Canadian group, they said the Polish remembrance institute was a solid
and reliable institution. It gained credibility by conducting a thorough
review of the events in Jedwabne, confirming that Poles played a central
role in the massacre. The Canadian Polish Congress has been pushing for
years for an investigation of the Koniuchy killings, on which it published
a book in 1998. The efforts gained new impetus after a Polish newspaper
reported on the incidents in 2001, quoting survivors and citing new archival
material confirming that a mass killing had taken place.

The fighting at Koniuchy is described in several Jewish accounts of
partisans' battles, including "The Avengers," a book by Rich Cohen, published
in 2000. The Jewish partisan units were part of a brigade commanded by
the former Vilna ghetto fighter Abba Kovner, who went on to become a leading
Israeli poet. In its letter to the institute calling for an investigation,
the Canadian group cited several accounts by Jewish partisans to back up
its allegations. The letter highlighted the role played by the Jewish partisan
groups and repeated the highest death estimates, while downplaying the
reported pro-Nazi attitude of the villagers. It also downplayed contemporary
accounts signaling the nearby presence of German and pro-German police
forces or fortifications around the village.

The Canadian group has called on the Polish government to bring the
perpetrators to justice and to strip the reputed commander of the partisan
unit, Genrikas Zimanas, of Poland's highest military honor.

Anthony Polonsky, a historian at Brandeis University, said that under
the circumstances, Poland's remembrance institute had no choice but to
open an investigation. The institute is now trying to reconstruct the actual
events that took place in Koniuchy, a small village at the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarus
border. Severin Hochberg, a historian with the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, said material he had seen suggested that civilians were
indeed killed by partisans, a view endorsed by several experts interviewed
for this article.

"At the time, the Soviets were on the offensive and the Jews fought
with them, so I believe something serious took place," he said. "But there
is still a lot of research to be done." One of the issues needed to be
settled is the number of deaths, which the Canadian Polish Congress puts
around 300. Most accounts hover between 30 and 40. A spokesman for the
institute, Andrzej Arseniuk, told the Forward the institute was basing
its research on the lower estimate. An examination of preliminary findings
summed up in several interim reports confirms that the institute is basing
its research on the assumption that 36 to 50 people were killed. In one
report, dated September 9, 2002, the institute's regional office in Lodz
said the villagers had organized a self-defense group to prevent Soviet
partisans from looting, prompting the partisan units to attack the village
in the early hours of January 29, 1944. The report cites witnesses saying
that the most numerous group of partisans were "of Jewish nationality"
and claims that there were some 50 Jews amid the 100 to 120 attackers.
In his letter to the Forward, the prosecutor cites a secret report from
the German Wermacht command in Riga a week after the incidents saying that
a group of Russians and Jews had killed 36 people and that the village
was burned to the ground.

A similar death tally was found in a Lithuanian pro-German police report,
according to Sarunas Lieckis, a Lithuanian researcher. Soviet reports mention
the event without giving body counts but emphasize that the self-defense
units of the village were harassing the partisans, according to Lieckis.
Professor Levin of Hebrew University, who was a member of the "Death to
the Occupants" partisan unit, said Koniuchy was an "event." He refused
to discuss the events further on the phone, adding that there were probably
mischievous designs behind the initiative to publicize the events.

A key issue facing Polish researchers will be to determine the degree
of autonomy of the Jewish units in the Soviet partisan hierarchy. The units
were incorporated within the Soviet command-and-control chain at the time,
according to historians Hochberg of the Holocaust Museum in Washington
and Israel Gutman of the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.

In its September 2002 interim report, the remembrance institute concurred,
saying that the partisan units were under the direct command of the central
partisan command in Moscow. That could indicate that singling out the Jewish
units is unlikely since they were part of the partisan infrastructure.
However, Hochberg added that one could possibly speak of a "semiautonomous"
situation in which the Jewish units had to fall in line with the Communist
leadership while maintaining some leeway in deciding their participation
in specific operations.